Gender Differentiated Impacts of Rural Advisory Services on Household and Child Nutrition

Gender-based inequalities in agriculture hinder the sector's ability to provide nutritious diets and improve nutritional outcomes, as rural advisory services (RAS) have not equally benefited male and female farmers. We causally decompose household food and child nutrition outcomes across male- and female-headed households based on their access to RAS. We use data from the World Bank's Integrated Household Panel Survey in Malawi for the period 2010/11, 2013/14, 2016/17, and 2019/20. The non-parametric causal decomposition and recentered influence function approaches are used to examine gender disparities. The results indicate that access to RAS by male- and female-headed households reduces the overall gender disparity in household dietary and food consumption scores and as well as the adoption of reduced coping strategies due to food insecurity. The findings reveal significant disparities in household food and child nutrition disparities between male-headed and female-headed households attributed to unequal access to RAS. Notably, RAS access mitigates inequalities in child nutrition indicators, including weight-to-age Z-score, weight-for-height Z-score, wasting, and underweight. These results underscore the potential of gender-sensitive RAS to bridge nutritional disparities at both the household and child levels.